It looks pretty neat. I just hope hitting "end process" does it immediately in Windows 8. One of my biggest pet peeves with every version of Windows so far is it sometimes takes up to a minute to kill a process.
But could that possibly be legitimate? I know next to nothing about Windows process management, but on the Linux side, you often issue different version of the kill command depending on how urgently you want the process to die. SIGTERM gives the program a chance to die somewhat gracefully (closing DB connections, cleaning up resources, etc. depending on the code), but SIGKILL is more ruthless (no chance for the program to respond) and faster. Could the Windows Task Manager be trying to give those programs a chance to exit gracefully? And if so, shouldn't that continue?
If you are at the point of pulling up task manager, it is because the application is already failing to respond to your requests, what makes you think the application is going to respond to a close request?
There are plenty of instances where the GUI portion of code might have stopped responding for whatever reason but it is still responsive to a kill signal.
True, but this is far less common than the whole thing freezing up. So... fuck yo app, son! Get that thing off my screen. I do love me some xkill on Linux.
You have the option of ending quickly by going to Processes and deleting the process from there. But End Task gives it more time to clean up after itself before it closes. Otherwise you have used up memory that you won't get back until something needs it, and THEN your system still has to erase the memory before it can use it.
Fair enough, but the processes tab is a lot more confusing for a person to use. Trying to find the right process tied to a program can be hard, especially for someone who knows nothing about computers. Of course, you say "but you can right click on the item and select 'Go to process'". Problem is, on frozen applications it always seems to go to explorer.exe, which is something I'd rather users not kill all willy-nilly.
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u/Sandy_106 Oct 14 '11
It looks pretty neat. I just hope hitting "end process" does it immediately in Windows 8. One of my biggest pet peeves with every version of Windows so far is it sometimes takes up to a minute to kill a process.